#like ‘Through the Looking Glass’ and ‘My Three Crichtons’

[this-is-a-love-story-isnt-it]

This dude has no idea what he’s talking about. I wish he wasn’t currently in charge of basically every Star Trek series

[harveyscape]

IM BORED. my top three farscape eps from each season::::::: looking at these i think season two has the best EPISODE concepts (it was hard choosing faves from that season bc i love so many) but season 4 is my favorite for just,,,,,,, the hecking Yearning + domestication in each episode but i dont particularly favor the episodes themselves 

Season 1:

through the looking glass - i always saw this ep as being the first completely filler ep that really felt like farscape with the crew all working together and having a VERY CUTE little laugh about it at the end. i love the vagueness of it, it’s not annoying or cliche??? and i’m particularly fond of the yellow moya scenes like rygel’s like “shall i disrobe so it will be memorable” is one of my fave lines from him.

a human reaction - mY TRASH. MYYYY TRASH. just one of those farscape eps that are so Abstract in concept, they are just Default Faves for me like Always haha. so many good little j/a crumbs, the kiss in this ep is one of my BIG FAVES, i love everything about that scene and the ones leading up to it. LOVE THE RAIN SCENE. it’s probably the very first time john is like ‘maybe Earth bad’ and,,, ‘maybe space girl Good’ and i love that thruline of the show. this ep stands soooooo far apart from the majority of season 1 for me.

nerve: the hidden memory - “THE RADIANT AERYN SUN.” stark isn’t unbearable in his debut episodes woah! i like him as a sad boy who isnt a plot device! love gilina, love her death (rip), love seeing how far john and aeryn have come since they’d last seen her, love aeryn and crais’s interaction in this episode like YES GIRL SLAY, love whenever aeryn has to juggle with feeling WEAK and having to put her big girl pants on to save her himbo, love any interaction between d’argo and aeryn LOVE THAT.

Season 2:

crackers don't matter - the DIALOGUE in this episode is Insane and i LOVE IT i think there are so many line deliveries in this ep that are so memorable and Iconic they all just live in my mind rent FREE. i wish the commentary for this episode wasn’t about the more practical aspects of it because UUUHUUH i genuinely would love to just Absorb the mindset behind it. GOD TIER FILLER. 

out of their minds - i am such a whore for body swap tropes it’s humiliating. another ep with a lot of iconic line deliveries! i love cb playing as john! love that for her! bb as rygel too is amazing i love all their stupid accent switching SO MUCH. love the skeksis love that they joke about them looking like skeksis because it’s jim henson and they can DO THAT. 

won't get fooled again - any time i think about this ep im like man how Opened Third Eye was it to have john just immediately be like “haha ok this is fake lmao” like it’s so SUBVERSIVE in what it does pretty much right off the bat in introducing the moya crew as “normal” humans. eps like these are just ALWAYS my faves in tv series because of how crazy they can get and this one does and i love it so much for that.

Season 3: 

scratch n' sniff - any time i get the moya crew on a pleasure planet or at a rave im like HELLO. :) I LOVE RAXIL she’s such a funky little freak. describing this ep is so weird its like Oh Yeah The Boob Juice Sucking One. JUST JOHN AND D’ARGO BEING BACHELORS, WHAT BLISS. i wish i got more john + d’argo shenanigans in this show ‘cause they are like such a fave together dynamically mwah mwah mwah. <3 

into the lion's den: wolf in sheep's clothing - its a little crazy how much i Hate the first half of this two-parter which is super PANDERY AND BAD and then the last half is like so Insane and such a good close for the season. EVERYONE’S SO MISERABLE. the scorp shots with the imploding ship and the water UGHGUGHUGH <33333 love aeryn in this love her trying to save the Peacekeepers, love JOHN, love the little scientist nerd who works under Scorp i forget his name WHOOPS he has a nice design. THE CRAIS + TALYN DEATH IS SO GOOD;;;; LOVE THAT FOR THEM;;;;; <3333

 dog with two bones - i think the fact that literally no other tv show has pulled THIS MESS off really speaks to the uniqueness of farscape and its ABILITY TO TELL ROMANCE??? theres so much in this that is just like WOWOWOWOW THIS EP IS SO GOOD. the part where they kill the rogue leviathan and rygel is celebrating on the comms and it transitions to aeryn Going Insane in her prowler over everything that’s happening. FIRE. the dog with two bones analogy UGHGUGHGUGH <333333 I LOVE THE AERYN > EARTH THRULINE WITH JOHN SO MUCH ITS JUST AT ITS PEAK HERE WHICH MAKES IT GREAT BY DEFAULT. the coin scene is SOOOOOO GOOOOOOOOD THE ENDING SCENE OF THIS EPISODE IS SOOOO GOOOOOD.

Season 4: 

john quixote - MY FAVE EP OF THE SERIES LOL. love the COSTUMING love the POP CULTURE REFERENCES love that its SEASON 4 love that we GET A ZHAAN CRAIS JOOL AND STARK CAMEO. another conceptually abstract episode so of course i love it lol. love the scene in the end with john and zhaan where he’s kinda a sad boy!!!!! actually funny story about this ep the first time i watched this i was in elementary school still, i grew up on this show this is my Nostalgia Baby series, and did not know what the word “porn” was so like for a very concerning amount of time i always assumed “porn” was an Alien Word and not a real word. BECAUSE LIKE, in context you see chiana holding up a Gooey Boy and going “and this? porn!” and that was all i had to go by the end.

crichton kicks - I LOOOOVE SAD JOHN. I LOVE HIM. I love the character beats we get out of a john that CHOSE THE GIRL over his home and instead of GETTING HER he is punished for it, losing his chance at BOTH OUTCOMES like mentioned in “dog with two bones” despite him having chosen One of the options and not both. love the introduction to 1812 whenever john gets a named thing i am like Yes. :~) my boy, my little man. he’s a little crazy and a little sad.

terra firma - the YEARNING in this ep man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this ep waters my CROPS one of my Biggest Fave scenes is when Aeryn and Jack are in her prowler talking about john and he’s like Do You Wish You Were Human and she doesnt answer and im like LORD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! more of that John Not Vibing With Earth Anymore trope which I LOVE. literally all fics surrounding this episode i will SNORT LIKE CRACK. 

[aion-rsa]

Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous Ending Explained

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The following contains spoilers for Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous.

Netflix and Dreamworks’ newest animated series, Jurassic: World Camp Cretaceous, takes the mythology of the Jurassic World franchise and focuses on a group of teen characters, surviving among the dinosaurs when the park’s safety features fail. Under the conceit that the park’s newest initiative is a camp for teens, a diverse group of young adults arrive to experience the wonder of living dinosaurs. But when, midway through the series, everything goes wrong, the kids are left on their own, forced to evade a carnotaurus and the incredibly dangerous Indominus rex. 

Not knowing whether a second season is planned, the final episode ends in a completely different place from where viewers might expect. While no second season has yet been announced, it’s clear from the final moments of the last episode that the story isn’t finished. While that may have left viewers feeling unresolved, the show is certainly enough fun for watchers to hope the characters will return for a second season, revealing how they put their survival skills to good use.

Catching the Ferry

While the first three episodes do a lot to establish the characters and the setting, as well as how it fits into the franchise, it’s episode four that really ramps up the stakes toward Camp Cretaceous’s ending. In episode four, the Indominus rex escapes its enclosure, and everything falls apart. “Assets” (dinosaurs) all over the park are on the loose. The kids, after returning to find their camp buildings destroyed, decide to make their way to the main park. After trial and error, they discover that it looks like the park has been abandoned.

And then, at the end of episode six, the alarm sounds. Episode seven begins with the evacuation order: “All park goers must report to the south ferry docks for immediate evacuation. Last ferry departs in two hours.” The timer is on, and the kids have to cross a park filled with hostile dinosaurs to make it off the island.

Once that goal is set, everything becomes about speed and distance. With one injured camper (Yasmina, previously the fastest among them, hurts her ankle in a fall), one slow camper (Ben, who just isn’t as athletic as the rest of them), and one baby dinosaur (Bumpy, the ankylosaurus the kids saw hatch, who imprinted on Ben, and whom Ben won’t abandon), speed is a challenge. Add to that a carnotaurus that seems absolutely hell-bent on attacking these kids, and that goal seems almost impossible.

And yet, the kids keep that sense of hope that they’ll make it. Right up until they don’t.

After an epic final battle between the campers and their carnotaurus nemesis, they finally exit a sealed building out onto the docks and into the sunshine. It’s that sunshine that seals their doom: the two hour limit would have put them on the docks at night. They’ve lost so many hours in their trip across the park, running from predators, counting on vehicles that abandon them in the wrong parts of the park, that morning has arrived, and the park has evacuated without them.

But the campers have been through so much that they refuse to give up. “They’ll be back for us, won’t they?” asks one. Darius, who has become the de facto leader of the group, answers, “Of course they will. And until then, we’ve got each other.” Their belief—and what they’ve already survived—promises these viewers that the campers will make it until someone arrives.

Or, possibly, they’ll build an entire civilization of their own while the grown ups are gone. Take that, Lord of the Flies.

Ben’s Fall

“None of the kids are going to die,” I promised my ten year old as we binged the last four episodes of Camp Cretaceous, all the while thinking, Come on, Dreamworks, don’t let any of these kids die…

As part of the Jurassic World franchise, there are no surprises in Camp Cretaceous having a body count, even though it’s aimed toward a younger audience. Over the course of the eight episodes, several adults are killed or eaten by therapods—without ever showing the bodies on screen. There’s no real blood or gore, but the intensity of the action is high enough that younger viewers won’t need anything more to get their adrenaline pumping.

In the second to last episode, Ben, the shiest camper, who’s least likely to take risks, saves the day. He crawls along the top of a speeding monorail to drop into the engineer’s car and stop the train from colliding with a stopped car. It’s a huge moment of triumph for Ben, and it’s immediately followed by a pteranodon shattering the glass of the train car and knocking Ben out the window, about to fall to his doom.

When, at the beginning of the final episode, Ben’s hand is firmly gripped by Darius, who’s trying to haul him back into the train, you can almost believe he’s going to make it. There’s a second when their hands slip, but Darius grabs Ben’s wrist with both hands, and the music shifts. Everything’s going to be all right.

Which is when the show goes for a one-two punch: a pteranodon knocks right into Ben, and Darius just can’t catch enough of his friend to keep him from plummeting from the tracks. The kids stare in horror from behind a crouched Darius as Ben hangs in the air, still reaching up for the train.

Worse, when the kids abandon the train (because it’s taking them away from the south docks), they lose track of Bumpy, Ben’s ankylosaurus. They debate: do they go back to look for Ben and Bumpy? Do they keep heading toward their only hope of escaping the island? What’s the moral choice? It’s a deep moment for younger viewers, knowing that there is no right answer: of course it’s the right thing to go look for Ben, but if it costs everyone else their lives—especially if Ben has already died in the fall—then they can’t afford to make the right choice.

So the campers leave Ben and Bumpy to their fates, hearts heavy with regret, while they continue their escape.

But, thank you Dreamworks, I did not lie to my ten year old. In the final moments of an intense last episode, after the rest of the campers are somewhat safe and the screen has gone dark, the animation continues, and Bumpy appears on screen, hurrying to Ben’s side. The boy lies still… but then his fingers twitch. Roll credits.

It’s possible that Ben will rise from this accident and become an antagonist determined to get revenge on the rest of the teens for abandoning him. But it’s equally likely that the campers will go out to look for him, now that they’ve lost the time crunch, and there will be a happy reunion for all. Only season two can tell us!

Sammy and Manta Corp

Although readers familiar with Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park books may peg BioSyn as the company most likely to try to undermine InGen’s control over Isla Nublar and the science behind Jurassic World, the company that’s outed for corporate espionage in Camp Cretaceous is Manta Corp (possibly Manticore). In an effort to gain access to the technology being developed by Dr. Wu for InGen, Manta Corp blackmailed camper Sammy to become a spy. Sammy, a gregarious Latina who loves her huge ranch family and seems determined to become friends with everyone, is the least likely character to become a spy. She’s over the top, not under the table. And yet, it’s exactly those qualities that force her to spy in the first place.

Sammy cares deeply—for her family and her friends. Her family supplies all the meat used by Jurassic World, but they had to borrow money to get to where they are. And the people behind that money—Manta Corp—are determined to use every advantage to gain access to InGen’s technology. They tell Sammy’s family to send her to Camp Cretaceous to spy, or they’ll call their debt.

Sammy’s family refuses. Sammy sneaks off, determined to save her family from ruin.

When social media star Brooklyn catches Sammy spying in Dr. Wu’s office (more successfully than Brooklyn herself, who is caught), she doesn’t dwell on it. But when Brooklyn realizes she has video proof of Sammy’s spying, and her phone suddenly vanishes, Brooklyn is determined to call Sammy out.

Sammy’s equally determined to deny everything.

But when the stolen phone is discovered, broken, falling out of Sammy’s pocket, she has to face facts. She confesses everything, and loses the friendship of the camper she admires most.

At the end of the season, all the campers look well on their way to forgiving Sammy, but what will happen with Manta Corp? Will they arrive on the island, looking to retrieve whatever information their spy left behind? Or will they consider Sammy a loss, and look for another way to gain access to Isla Nublar? Odds are good that the threat of Manta Corp isn’t finished, and the teens will have to face them again in the future.

The Rescue

While this is probably the least precarious loose thread in Camp Cretaceous, viewers may wonder about the fate of Brooklyn’s social media channel, a major concern for a chunk of the series, will recover from the Internet randos who declare her “over.” When the superstar disappears, lost after the evacuation, will her fans come to the rescue? Will her disappearance be the thing that makes her a superstar again, or will she fade into obscurity? Likewise, Kenji’s wealthy family doesn’t seem to care much about him when he’s around, but when he’s missing, odds are good they’ll spare no expense to rescue their kid.

The most guaranteed team dedicated to rescuing the Camp Cretaceous campers is that of Dave and Roxie, their counselors, who’d intended to leave them for just forty-five minutes, and instead were never able to get back to them during the evacuation. Dave and Roxie do their best through the entire series to keep the teens out of trouble—an impossible proposition, even if the whole island hadn’t been evacuated. Remarkably, as the counselors follow the signal of the lost teens around the island, they never encounter the difficulties their campers do. Where the campers see the carnotaurus and have a dramatic encounter, Dave and Roxie see it off in the distance and manage to avoid an encounter entirely. When we last see the counselors, it’s on the back of an evacuation boat, with Roxie demanding that the security officer turn the boat around. Roxie, in fact, almost gets into a physical altercation with the security officer before Dave pulls her back. If anyone’s definitely determined to come to the rescue, it’s those two counselors, and even a mosasaurus won’t be able to stop them.

The faith that Darius pretends to have in those final moments—that of course someone will return for them—isn’t misplaced. Someone will be back for the kids.

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And until they return, at least the campers have each other.

The post Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous Ending Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[hobbit-studies-blog]

Studyblr Introduction - Hobbit Studies

Hello there! After maybe half a month with this new blog, I’m finally doing an Introduction! Although I’ve been circlying the studyblr community since March/April, I decided to create this blog because the previous one was becoming a bit of a mess, and I like the whole studyblr concept, mainly because it seems to me like a great way to motivate myself and meet other people (two things I’m awful at).

Basics

Name’s Camila, nickname’s Mila. She/they pronouns.

I’m 22 years old. I was born on February 18th, 1995.

I’m from Chile, I live in the Fifth Region of Valparaíso. Also, my first language is Spanish.

I’m in my first year of Pedagogy in History and Social Sciences (teaching), tho History Major seems simpler? And I’m aiming to be a historian, so, there’s that.

I my family really have three dogs (Maya, Lucy & Richie) and three cats (Mona Lisa, Cleopatra & Chimuela).

My interests as of now are Indigenous Societies, History of Women, and Eastern History/Studies.

Favorites (as of now)

Animals: Wolves, Orca whales, Dolphins, Crows, Tigers, Foxes, Elephants, Cheetas.

Flowers/plants: Lobularia maritima, Lobelia erinus, Kalanchoe blossfeldiana, Aloysia citriodora

Genres: Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Science Fiction.

Authors: Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, J.R.R. Tolkien, Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, maybe Cornelia Funke, Gabriel García Márquez, Isaac Asimov, Michael Crichton, Jane Austen.

Books: The Hobbit, Jurassic Park, The Illustrated Man, The Green Mile, The Martian, The Book Thief, Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass.

Book series/trilogies: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Millenium Trilogy (haven’t read the new books yet), The Middle Earth Universe, Percy Jackson and the Olympians/The Heroes of Olympus (I still haven’t read the last two books), Robert Langdon Series, Artemis Fowl.

Comicbooks/manga: Mafalda, Hellboy, the two first volumes of The Sandman, Ajin, Ao No Exorcist, The Umbrella Academy, Trespasser, Alabaster: Wolves, The Wake.

Movies: Interstellar, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Monuments Men, The Book Thief, E.T., Jurassic Park, Super 8, Big Hero 6, Lilo & Stitch, Wreck-It-Ralph, Megamind, Up, WALL-E, The Boxtrolls, ParaNorman, anything Miyazaki I’ve ever watched.

Movie series/trilogies: Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Millenium (Swedish films), the MCU, The Dark Knight, Alien, How To Train You Dragon, Harry Potter.

TV shows: Gravity Falls, Over the Garden Wall, Jessica Jones, Stranger Things.

Bands: Linking Park, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Nine Inch Nails, Imagine Dragons, Florence + The Machine, The Gathering, The Gazette.

Solo artists: Sia, maybe Max Richter and Hans Zimmer.

Inspirations @studyquill @architstudy @theunderagelawyer @hadestudy @jawnkeets @bookeworm94 @lilymaidofgallifrey @lychiestudies

Special mention to @absit--omen, because she’s a sweetheart.

[topmixtrends]

WELCOME TO the House of Pain. As I greet you, I’m suffering from various not-quite-self-inflicted wounds. There are small punctures in my shins and thighs where I’ve been pierced by the pointed ends of agave leaves. There are a couple of inflamed patches on my forearms where I splashed some sap on myself while trimming a euphorbia. There are opuntia spines in my hands and also, I’m sure, in my clothes, which I will only discover as they gradually work their way into my flesh.

Yes, I have been working in the Garden of Pain, which surrounds the house, what I usually refer to as a cactus garden, though in fact it contains as many succulents as it does cacti, and of course a few plants that are neither. Botanists differ, but the current consensus is that all cacti are succulents but by no means are all succulents cacti. This is only a small help, and the layman — which I most certainly am — can have a hell of a job telling what’s a true cactus and what isn’t. (Clue: It’s largely about the areoles.)

More correctly, I suppose I should say I have a xerophile garden. Xerophile: From the Greek, xeros meaning dry and philos meaning loving. (The term refers not to people who love these plants but to the plants themselves, which love dryness.) My own interest in xerophiles started when I moved to Los Angeles, partly because I took seriously all those warnings about the evils or watering your own backyard in a time of drought and partly because, as a deracinated Englishman, a xerophile garden was about as far away from the traditional English garden as I could imagine. But chiefly I got hooked because there’s something so compelling about living things that have so thoroughly adapted to hostile environments, and because xerophiles look so beautifully strange and strangely beautiful.

When word gets around that you’re a cactus (and xerophile) enthusiast people have a tendency to give you cactus-related items of varying degrees of kitschiness. And so in the House of Pain you’ll find T-shirts, tea towels, socks, and hats, all bearing images of cacti. There are cactus-shaped coasters, cactus-shaped margarita glasses, and a cactus-shaped bottle opener. Nobody, as yet, has offered me anything from Cartier’s “Cactus de Cartier” range, perhaps because the basic bracelet goes for about $30,000, but it’s early days.

Of course I have books, a shelf that includes Edward Abbey’s Cactus Country from the Time Life “American Wilderness” series; What Kinda Cactus Izzat?, a cartoon “who’s who of desert plants” by Reg Manning; the photographer Lee Friedlander’s The Desert Seen; and for the title alone (though the jacket’s pretty amazing too) Naked in a Cactus Garden by Jesse L. Lasky Jr., “a novel of Hollywood” in which “character after character is stripped of every pretense.” I’m also very fond of an essay titled “Cactus Teaching” by Michael Crichton (yes, that Michael Crichton) in which he goes to seek enlightenment at a meditation conference in the desert. He’s told to find a rock or plant that “speaks” to him, and after much searching and soul-searching he finds a small, unspectacular, damaged cactus in the garden of the institute where the conference is taking place. “The cactus had equanimity; ants ran over its surface, and it didn’t seem to mind,” Crichton writes. “It was certainly very attractive, with red thorns and a green body; bees were attracted to it. The cactus had a formal aspect; its pattern of thorns gave it almost a herringbone look. This was an Ivy League cactus. I saw it as dignified, silent, stoic, and out of place.”

If all this might make you think that I’m obsessed with xerophiles, my response would be to proffer a copy of Xerophile: Cactus Photographs from Expeditions of the Obsessed and say, “You think I’m obsessed — get a load of this.” No author is named on the jacket or the title page, but we in the L.A. xerophile community know that it’s the effort of Jeff Kaplon, Max Martin, and Carlos Morera, the guys who run Cactus Store in Echo Park. Xerophile is an extraordinary book, a singular and single-minded volume. It contains 300 pages of photographs, preceded by a three-page preface and rounded off with a 30-page section containing interviews with eight xerophile enthusiasts (xerophile-philes?): not people like me, but the kind who go on expeditions that require being dropped in by helicopter. There’s also a short appendix on relevant topics that includes “off-roading,” “mirage,” and “oblivion.”

But, really, it’s all about the photographs, taken over a period of some 70 years, of xerophiles glimpsed in situ around the world. A few are in the United States, but the majority are from Mexico and South America, along with outliers from such gloriously “far away places” as Somalia, the Galápagos Islands, Madagascar, and Namibia. Twenty-five named photographers are credited, although one or two images are captioned “photographer unknown,” and in some cases the date isn’t known either. This might create some irritation for the more academic reader, and I think that kind of reader is going to be irritated by other parts of the book too. As far as I can see there’s no obvious, overarching organizing principle at work in the arrangement and selection of photographs — it’s simply what’s in the Cactus Store’s archive — and yet I can’t say that I particularly minded. The overall effect is more celebratory than scholarly, and that’s fine by me.

Xerophile is somewhere between a coffee-table book and a slightly chaotic field guide. I know from extensive personal experience that it’s very easy to take dull pictures of cacti. And although some of the pictures in the book are incredibly dramatic, very few have the gloss and stylishness of professional photographs. The preface describes the images as “evidence.” A few are a bit blurry, either because of faltering focus or because of the low quality of the camera and lens, but this somehow only adds to the sense of authenticity. When you’re halfway up a mountain in Chile you may not have time for sophisticated and considered aesthetic choices. We’re not in National Geographic territory here. The plants are the stars, and the photographers are the adoring fans, perhaps in some cases the paparazzi, snapping what they can on the fly.

The fact is you can forgive quite a lot of technical and compositional failings in order to see things you’ve never seen before, like an Adenium in Namibia that looks like a long-dead tree but is bearing extraordinary white flowers at the tips of its branches. Or Peruvian Haageocereus plants growing in a foggy habitat and consequently covered in bright yellow lichen. Or cacti growing out of rock faces, poking up through broad stretches of sand or lava fields.

Human beings appear in some of the photographs. At the very least this is useful to give a sense of scale. We all know that cacti grow to spectacular heights, but when we see a picture that shows a full grown man looking utterly insignificant at the base of a 70-foot-tall Pachycereus pringlei, the sense of surprise and amazement is brought home with incredible force. Other pictures show botanists at work in the field, usually but not always in the desert, taking measurements or collecting seeds. One of my favorite photographs, dated 1952, shows George Lindsay, former director of the California Academy of Science, standing next to a Ferocactus that’s a good head taller than he is and much wider in girth. He’s khaki-clad, wearing sunglasses and a solar topee, has a camera and light meter slung around his neck, and he’s smoking a fat cigar. One’s sense of nostalgia (today’s desert rats just don’t look anything like that), along with the inevitable phallic resonance of a certain kind of cactus, are elegantly and wittily confirmed.

The most tantalizing, and to some extent frustrating, part of the book is the section of interviews with xerophile obsessives, frustrating only in the sense that it leaves you wanting much more. In there you’ll find tales of near-death experience from Joël Lodé, who suffered severe heatstroke on his first trip to the Mojave desert in 1984, and survived to risk his life in much the same way in New Mexico and Baja. He also went to Yemen at the height of the civil war to “photograph a plant.” I’m not sure what kind of plant that was, but I hope it was the Euphorbia abdelkuri discussed in a different interview with John Jacob Lavranos who hitched a ride with the British navy, across pirate-infested waters, to the island of Abd al-Kuri in 1967. (It’s part of Yemen, but closer to Somalia, hence the pirates.) Lavranos says that seeing the Euphorbia abdelkuri “was one of the highlights of my life. I’ll never forget it — coming up over the mountain and seeing those tall green candles, which, of course were Euphorbias that were centuries old.” Asked if he collected plants on the trip he replies, “Yes, of course. Every single Euphorbia abdelkuri in circulation came from that trip.” A little research reveals that they’re now extremely rare, both in collections and on the island.

Others are less interested in collecting than taxonomy, a fascinating and ultimately mind-boggling field that increasingly relies on molecular analysis. There’s an interview with a married couple, both botanists, named Giovanna Anceschi and Alberto Magli who say they have no desire for possession. Magli says,

For me, there’s nothing further from nature than a greenhouse. People put plants next to each other that would never, ever be seen together in nature. That’s fine for a fan. But not for a researcher, and I would venture to say that it’s part of the reason people continue to have confused ideas about the taxonomy of these plants.

The old wisdom was that there were about 175 genera and 2,000 species of cacti but the current thinking is that many of these are the same basic plant, achieving different forms because of different environments. Most of us amateurs would indeed welcome some clarification on the subject, and advice on how to identify obscure genera and species (the people who work in nurseries are seldom much help), but this pair really don’t put your mind at rest: “We eventually realized that many of the species you see in books don’t exist.”

If you want more detail, without an absolute guarantee of clarification, may I direct you to the activities of the International Cactaceae Systematics Group, a working party of the International Organization for Succulent Plant Study, which has been contemplating these matters since the mid-1980s? In fact there are many online cactus and succulent websites and groups. Few of them are quite as interesting or as obsessive as Xerophile, though I did come across the website for The Cactus Store which currently lists a Haageocereus tenuis for sale, yours for a cool quarter of a million dollars. They warn gravely, “This is not a statement piece, a collectors item, or a center piece for your garden. This is a critically endangered specimen plant for those familiar with ex-situ conservation who have a proper greenhouse setup.” Even in matters of obsession it’s good to know your limits.

¤

Geoff Nicholson is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books. His latest novel is The Miranda.

The post Cactus Love: On “Xerophile: Cactus Photographs from Expeditions of the Obsessed” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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